Experimental evaluation of a video streaming system for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are recently emerging as an extension to traditional scalar wireless sensor networks, with the distinctive feature of supporting the acquisition and delivery of multimedia content such as audio, images and video. In this paper, a complete framework is proposed and developed for streaming video flows in WMSNs. Such framework is designed in a cross-layer fashion with three main building blocks: (i) a hybrid DPCM/DCT encoder; (ii) a congestion control mechanism and (iii) a selective priority automatic request mechanism at the MAC layer. The system has been implemented on the IntelMote2 platform operated by TinyOS and thoroughly evaluated through testbed experiments on multi-hop WMSNs. The source code of the whole system is publicly available to enable reproducible research. © 2011 IEEE.